Infoscience provides open access to EPFL research
CC BY-NC-SA EPFL Library
Infoscience is EPFL’s open-access archive of research publications. It was set up in 2004 in order to disseminate our research findings and showcase our discoveries on the international stage.
Where MIT has DSpace and ETH Zurich has Research Collection, EPFL has Infoscience. This online database contains over 160,000 EPFL publications, including articles published in scientific journals, conference presentations, thesis dissertations, technical reports, patents, grey literature and even Master’s papers.
In 2021, 43% of the entries in Infoscience linked to the full text, which meant anyone could access them. To make it easier to find specific publications, many of the references are imported automatically from other databases like Web of Science, IS Academia and Espacenet.
Infoscience is a key element of the open-access landscape. Several other leading platforms link to it, such as OpenAIRE — a European network of Open Access Desks — and Google Scholar, providing excellent visibility to our researchers and our School in general.
This database underscores EPFL’s commitment to open science.
“Infoscience is a pivotal element of EPFL’s contribution to open science. While the primary goal may be to promote the research done at our School and boost its visibility, Infoscience also reflects our commitment to free and open access to scientific knowledge.”
It gives labs complete visibility online.
“Infoscience is a powerful resource for the heads of our research labs. It saves them the tedious task of listing all the references for their labs’ publications, and it gives their labs full visibility online. That kind of value for money can’t be beat!”
Over a century of EPFL theses
Infoscience contains all theses written by EPFL students, with most of them available in electronic format. Printed versions are carefully stored at the EPFL Library in the Rolex Learning Center. With Infoscience, you can click through the very first EPFL dissertation, from 1920: Roland Zehnder-Spoerry’s study on the friction-induced heating of railcar wheel treads as a result of braking.
We make sure the bibliographic data are reliable.
“Behind the Infoscience database, there’s also a vast array of services offered by the EPFL Library. Our Infoscience support team answers questions related to filing publications (e.g., rights and license issues) and to technical issues like how to enter data and generate lists of publications. We also make sure the bibliographic data are reliable so that each publication is correctly indexed and cited.”